Author: Jonathan

Jamie Cullum, whose “All at Sea” has broken the British jazz singer and pianist into the mainstream, is about to break a little further.

For the follow-up and second single from Twentysomething, the self-taught musician is releasing his version of Radiohead’s 1995 single “High and Dry.”

“As well as writing songs, jazz musicians are always trying to take material and do new things with it,” Cullum said. “The notion of a standard is something that is 50 years old to most people. I only discovered [what are considered] old songs about three years ago. An old song to me is ‘High and Dry,’ which is a song I grew up with. I was 14. If you could play it on the guitar, you could kiss all the girls.”

Cullum plans to shoot a video for “High and Dry” later this month. “We’ve got a very strong idea, very mysterious, very different, so I wouldn’t want to give it away,” he said. More at MTV…

Vote Radiohead into Channel 4’s “UK Music Hall of Fame” by clicking here!
(thanks to Wesley)

Though it’s been rumored for some time now, the official Radiohead site now has info about the new Radiohead DVD entitled “The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of all Time.” Here is some info:

Radiohead Television, a 110 minute excursion into the bizarre.
From a glass-walled boardroom in west London, via a small spare room in Willesden, past the flood-torn wastes of Cornwall and the landfill sites of ‘picturesque’ rural Oxfordshire, a carefully-vetted team of ‘experts’ has been plotting to create a DVD containing films, animations and music never heard before. Channel 4 wouldn’t show it, for reasons that remain unclear. The BBC were busy. ITV and Channel 5 simply pretended we didn’t exist. But our ‘experts’ are certain that the discerning public must be allowed to view this material.
Containing music from Radiohead’s ‘Hail to the Thief’ as well as tracks unreleased before, set to a collection of perhaps the strangest videos you’ve seen on your teevee, and introduced by the one-and-only, the incorrigible, the indefatigable, the certifiable Chieftan Mews…
It is, without doubt, The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of all Time.

You can view the trailer here. You can pre-order it here.

The NPPA has voted Jason Bell of Time Magazine a 2nd place winner for Magazine Portraiture & Personality. The entries are judged on how well the picture captures an aspect of the subject’s character. Jason Bell’s subject is Thom Yorke. See more here.
(thanks to Brenda)

Welcome to the new site! Please enjoy your visit and let us know if you encounter any problems while here.

This is an article by pop critic David Sinclair in the London Times T2 pull-out section on Thursday 7th October about Radiohead’s soundtrack for Merce Cunningham’s “Split Sides”:

Although it has not been deemed worthy of a commercial release, the recorded soundtrack which Radiohead provided for Merce Cunningham’s Split Sides has done nothing to harm their status as godheads of rock’s avante-garde. A free-form extension of the ideas they explored on numbers such as The Gloaming on their Hail to the Thief album from last year, this was ambient music at its most abstract and atonal.
Agitated percussion loops were dispersed among bleak washes of white noise to create a tense, unsettling atmosphere. At one point it sounded as if a needle had been left scratching against the playout groove of a vinyl record, while vague electronic ululations and a babel of voices hovered on the periphery uneven, it rubbed against the grain of the dancers movements like sandpaper.
While not as celebrated as Radiohead, the Icelandic group Sigur Ro’s have actually been making music of a similarly atmospheric nature for much longer. and it sounded like it. their recorded contribution to Split Sides, which was widely acclaimed on its release earlier this year as an EP entitled Baba Tiki Dido, shimmered and twinkled like jewellery in the sun.
Although more evolved than Radiohead’s stark electronic doodling, Sigur Ros’s music evoked a mood of more innocent playfulness.Performed on various instruments invented specifically for this project by the group. including a percussion rack made out of ballet shoes called a “bomsett”, it moved in crystalline patterns that echoed the cyclical melodies of a child’s musical box – a comparatively benign and rather more alert Dr Jekyll to radiohead’s neurotic and sometimes rambling Mr Hyde.

(thanks to Abe)